


Of waves and embers

by tip_of_the_Q



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Angst, Branjie, Hurt, M/M, Romance, canon adjacent, rpdr fanfiction, tw mentions of substance abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 10:56:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18467527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tip_of_the_Q/pseuds/tip_of_the_Q
Summary: Vanessa Vanjie Mateo is fire.Brooke Lynn Hytes is the ocean.They never really knew how to exist within one another.





	Of waves and embers

**Author's Note:**

> this story is my baby, and I’m pretty proud of it. It’s a little dark and twisty, so be sure to check the trigger-warnings before reading! Also, don’t be afraid to tell me what you think. It’s how I improve every day.
> 
> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Word count: 2222 (yes, really)

Vanessa Vanjie Mateo is fire.

 

She is a steady burn, unapproachable and painful to the touch.

 

She is a construction of sharp angles and wicked words, a tangled mess of vigorous emotions and barbed wire fences. She is a beacon of light that illuminates every corner and every hidden nook and cranny she comes across. She is at once beautiful and terrifying, capable of whatever she sets her mind to.

 

Yet she refrains. She refrains from exploding like the supernova she has the potential to be. She refrains from throwing herself into the arms of the wild world, constricting her flame to fit inside the heart of the one person who means more to her than burning ever could.

 

Brooke Lynn Hytes is an ocean.

 

Brooke Lynn is an ocean filled with unknown creatures and topped by frothy waves. She is the taste of salt and the exhilarating sensation of breaking through the surface and filling your lungs with air. She is accurately named, her soul as vividly living as the hustle and bustle of the city, her being as wild and unpredictable as the turning of the tides, her eyes as deep as the inmost parts of the sea.

 

She is soft to look at, unobtrusive and fit for a life in the corners of a room. She licks at the feet of the unprepared, catching ships and sailors unaware. She takes advantage of being at once visible and painfully ignored. She roars, a powerful storm, uncontained.

 

And she is unaware of the effect the ocean has on fire. 

 

**/ / /**

 

The downfall of Vanessa Vanjie Mateo is quick and unforgiving.

 

It is the crashing of a plane into a small town community on a sunny day. It’s the feeling of blood pounding in your ears, and the swift execution of one who once looked immortal.

 

She buries herself in women, weed and vodka. At times she falls into the dangerous pit that is cocaine, and at times she knows she should stop before she gets too caught up in her own web of self deception.

 

Vanessa tells herself she is perfectly fine. She tells herself she isn’t a forest fire burning out of control, that she is not the tail at the end of a meteor. She is merely living her life to the best of her ability - and if she wants to destroy herself, well, she will be the maker of her own destruction. She has learnt long ago never to give anyone that kind of power over her. If she is to burn alive, she will be the one to strike the match.

 

Brooke Lynn sits in Nashville, in a prison of her own making. She thinks of her old friend, her partner, her soulmate. Her home.

 

Sometimes home is more than just a house or a safe place to stay. It isn’t always about familiar scenery, slept in sheets or the smell of eggs in the morning.

 

Sometimes home is a set of open arms. A collection of shared memories and the intimacy of knowing someone understands your mind. It can be a certain someone who simply exists with you, for you, and in a space that is as much theirs as it is your own. Sometimes home is another person.

 

And Brooke’s home is Vanessa.

 

And with every beat of her heart, she hopes to God Vanessa is okay.

 

That the house hasn’t crumbled.

 

**/ / /**

 

The show ends, and the tour begins.

 

Brooke Lynn plans.

 

She gets so caught up in the scheduling and the performance that she doesn’t notice Vanessa fading away. She only sees what is right in front of her, the praise at the end of her flawless act. She sees Vanessa smile as she proudly presents the plan to their makeshift family, the girls that have seen their rise and fall. Followed the rollercoaster that speeded down fiery tracks, through looks and kisses and moments that were so sacred, the cameras never did them justice. She hears Vanessa interject with her own little snippets of thoughts, and she smiles at the enthusiasm with which she presents.

 

She doesn’t think anything of how Vanessa locks herself away in her hotel room when everyone else goes out to explore the pulsing nightlife of undiscovered cities. She has learned the in and out’s of Vanessa, knows how she likes to stay focused when she has a job to do. She doesn’t think anything of the smell of vodka on Vanessa’s breath first thing in the morning, or the way the brunette seems to sometimes sniffle uncontrollably. She is all skin and bone, she’s prone to colds.

 

Every little thing that slips beneath the waves of her awareness, is chalked up to the time they have spent apart. She had expected Vanessa to have changed. She knows  _ she _ has changed, knows that she is no longer as gullible, or as easily rattled. She wonders if Vanessa might be changed in the same way.

 

Vanessa hides. And she knows that in hiding, she is admitting to the fact that something is not right.

 

But she also knows that if she allows Brooke to see the mess she truly is, there is no way she will ever view her the same way again. The bond between them is fragile, tentative. It is a reconstruction of what once was, but with bricks yet to be placed and a foundation that has not yet settled.

 

She uses her room as an escape, a safe space where she is free to feed the flames licking at her feet, inching further up her body. She pours gasoline on to the fire and revels in the way it burns. She pours vodka down her throat and takes pleasure in the sting it leaves behind. She sits on the balcony at 3 in the morning, when everyone else is asleep or wandering the streets, smoking. She smokes till her lips tingle and her fingers are numb from the cold. She smokes until her eyes are so clouded with smoke that she can barely keep them open. Occasionally she smokes to forget her sorrows, knowing that the smell of cannabis will linger long after. 

 

On the worst nights, the nights following the days where her and Brooke spent every hour talking, joking, reconnecting, she makes a call of desperation. Desperation shows up with a tiny ziplock bag and she waits by the door with a wad of cash. It leaves under the cover of night, and Vanessa goes out.

 

She ends up visiting a wide array of clubs, always waiting till she hears her sisters tumble through the hotel hallways, doors slamming behind them as they seek sleep. She gets drunk, she gets high, she gets elated by the feeling of the bass pounding in her ears and the sensation of bare skin beneath her fingertips.

 

Vanessa tries to dull the fire with a steady breeze of other women.

 

But she knows the air can never kill the flame.

 

**/ / /**

 

Brooke Lynn sits on the edge of her bed when she can’t sleep. She watches terrible TV, although she at times gets lucky and finds a rerun of Golden Girls. It’s a way to pass time. It is a way to ignore the fact that she doesn’t know where Vanessa is, who Vanessa is with, or what Vanessa might be doing.

 

She would be fooling herself if she tried to make herself believe the door that closes at 4am on most nights and the click of heels on linoleum hallways, is anyone other than Vanessa.

 

Just as she fools herself into thinking it has nothing to do with her, nothing to do with the way they left things between them. She ponders this fact when she is locked out of a hotel room in Prague at five in the morning, waiting for a worker of any kind to come and reconnect her with her keycard, resting comfortably on her bedside table. Her fingers create mindless swirls in the bucket of melted ice by her side, the ripples matching the ripples of sadness that whirl in her lungs.

 

She’s still sitting there half an hour later, when Vanessa tumbles down the hall, a bottle filled with a sickly green liquid clutched in her fist. She looks sick and tired and like she’s been dragged through the fiery ocean of hell.

 

Then their eyes connect, and Vanessa falters, her face shifting. Features turn soft, a simmering heat, a flame that’s always burning when she meshes with Brooke Lynn’s watering eyes.

 

She stands as still as a statue, all of her motions internal. Brooke is clad in nothing but a flimsy hotel robe, and she is all soft curves and thinly stretched skin and uncombed tufts of hair. She sits in the flickering fluorescent lights and looks at once ethereal and fragile, like an angel made of glass. A smile graces her features, and the calm it emits amongst the ruins of scattered words and emotions between them is frightening in its intensity.

 

The moment is short, and Vanessa can’t bear how she feels a familiar pull at her heart and body when it ends. She needs to leave.

 

“Wait.”

 

It is no more than a word. It is a mere uttering of syllables that should not have the power to hold Vanessa back with ease. But it is also Brooke Lynn, and Brooke is the one thing she has never been able to ignore. Brooke is a concentration of everything that hurts and glows and flutters in her chest at night, the one thing that cuts through the noise and grounds her.

 

And Brooke looks at Vanessa for the first time in ages, really looks at her. There is distress swimming in the brown of her eyes. It is the crinkling of old leather and the forest bed after a night of rain.

 

She feels Brooke looking through her, trying to cut through the fog that fills her eyes and her soul and is slowly suffocating her.

 

“Are you okay?”

 

It is such a simple question, really. A yes or a no. It should be easy to answer.

 

But Vanessa is really neither. She breaks during the day, forces herself through interactions with the woman she loves above all else but who is completely unaware. Forces herself to act normal, to try and resist from throwing it all away and simply leaving to somewhere that is easier. But during the night, she is okay. She is perfectly content. She is drunk and she is young and she is spinning out of control. It would be both delicious and bitter, should she dare taste.

 

Yet Brooke knows her. Really  _ knows _ her. They may not have known each other for long, but nearly a year long stint spent apart is not enough to break their connection. And Vanessa knows that if she tries to hide anything from Brooke, it will be revealed the minute Brooke decides she really wants to find out what it is.

 

Brooke is the water that drowns the forest fire, spreading into every corner, crack and miniscule space to explore and cover. There has been enough lying and betraying between them, for them to know when it is happening. For them to know that they don’t want it to happen anymore.

 

So Vanessa doesn’t lie. She smiles. She smiles and her eyes water and she shakes her head because really, Brooke would never forgive her for the truth and saying nothing is a lot easier.

 

She leaves Brooke sitting in the dark, wondering what on earth went wrong.

 

If it is too late to fix it.

 

**/ / /**

 

The next night, Brooke Lynn waits up for Vanessa to arrive back at the hotel once more. She sits on her balcony, the one that overlooks the street below her. Here, she smokes and thinks and then tries to stop thinking, as the tide of her thoughts unveils unpleasant memories.

 

Vanessa must have expected her. Brooke steps into the hallway the minute she hears the telltale  _ beep _ of Vanessa’s keycard. When she gets there, Vanessa is waiting for her, holding the door open.

 

There once used to be a burning heat in the air surrounding Vanessa, now replaced by a dull, flowing smoke that signifies the dying of a final spark. She is muted, as if viewed from within the confines of a TV screen, hazy and unpinnable. 

 

Brooke Lynn hates it. It feels like she’s drowning.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“You took my dream from me.”

 

“You fucked someone else less than a day after we ended things.”

 

“I’m sorry, too.”

 

Words are sparse, but the touches are many. Lips find lips and hands find hands, and Vanessa feels at home for the first time in ages. Brooke is willing to whip up a tsunami, willing to drown a few innocent people, if it means she can make this night last forever.

 

Forgiveness floats on embers around them, like fireflies trapped in thick oil midair.

 

Vanessa might be a fire, and Brooke might be an ocean. And it might never work.

 

But maybe, just maybe, they’ll both learn to change.

 

Maybe, one day, they’ll be colliding winds, swirling in a tornado of mutual support and understanding.

 

Maybe they’ll learn.

 

And even if they don’t, burning, drowning,  _ dying _ , is better than never living at all.

  
  



End file.
